The Real Adventure eBook

“She’ll be down presently, I think,”
her mother said. “She called out to me
that she’d only be a minute, when I passed her
door. Does your hat mean you’re going back
to the shop this afternoon?”

Portia nodded, pulled back her chair abruptly and
sat down. “Oh, don’t ring for Inga,”
she said. “What’s here’s all
right, and she takes forever.”

“I thought that on Saturday ...” her mother
began.

“Oh, I know,” said Portia, “but
Anne Loomis telephoned she’s going to bring
Dora Wild around to pick out which of my three kidney
sofas she wants for a wedding present. That girl
I’ve got isn’t much good, and besides,
I think there’s a chance that Dora may give me
her house to do. Her man’s stupidly rich,
they say, and richly stupid, so the job ought to be
worth eating a cold egg for.”

You’d have known them for mother and daughter
anywhere, and you’d have had trouble finding
any point of resemblance in either of them to the
Amazonian young thing who had so nearly thrown a street-car
conductor into the street the night before. Their
foreheads were both narrow and rather high, their
noses small and slightly aquiline, and both of them
had slender fastidious hands.

The mother’s hair was very soft and white, and
the care with which it was arranged indicated a certain
harmless vanity in it. There was something a
little conscious, too, about her dress—­an
effect difficult to describe without exaggeration.
It was not bizarre nor “artistic,” but
you would have understood at once that its departures
from the prevailing mode were made on principle.
If you took it in connection with a certain resolute
amiability about her smile, you would be entirely
prepared to hear her tell Portia that she was reading
a paper on Modern Tendencies before the Pierian Club
this afternoon.

A very real person, nevertheless, you couldn’t
doubt that. The marks of passionately held beliefs
and eagerly given sacrifices were etched with undeniable
authenticity in her face.

Once you got beyond a catalogue of features, Portia
presented rather a striking contrast to this.
Her hair was done—­you could hardly say
arranged—­with a severity that was fairly
hostile. Her clothes were bruskly cut and bruskly
worn, their very smartness seeming an impatient concession
to necessity. Her smile, if not ill-natured—­it
wasn’t that—­was distinctly ironic.
A very competent, good-looking young woman, you’d
have said, if you’d seen her with her shoulder-blades
flattened down and her chest up. Seeing her to-day,
drooping a little over the cold lunch, you’d
have left out the adjective young.

“So Rose didn’t come down this morning
at all,” Portia observed, when she had done
her duty by the egg. “You took her breakfast
up to her, I suppose.”